This is the first part of a two-part article. It continues with, “It’s a Good Thing Coming Down: The State of the World of Measurement, Part 2,” in our March issue.
From the song “Walls” © 1989, by Rick Watson:
“When the people raise their voice, finally realized their choice
Freedom made her sound,
It was a good thing coming down. …
When that wall hit that ground, it was a good thing coming down
It was a good thing when they opened up their hearts
Such a good thing to make a new world start
You know it was a good thing to find the courage to let go
Such a good thing when they found the strength to know.
It took me years to build this wall, a house of cards that had to fall,
When that wall hit the ground, it was good thing coming down. “
New Hampshire singer/songwriter Rick Watson wrote those lyrics after the Berlin Wall fell, but they apply today to the world of marketing measurement. There are enormous changes happening in the world of measurement, and they all spring from the dissolution of the walls and silos that have plagued our profession for years.
It’s a good thing they’re coming down.
The corporate “house of cards” that had to fall were the silos that have for years separated PR people from customers, internal communications from external, marketing from PR. For too long, organizations have maintained strict walls between internal and external communications, digital and traditional media, marketing and PR, even between qualitative and quantitative metrics. The fundamental flaw in their thinking was that they had any control over the voices that drive business today. Thanks to social media, data mining, and more sophisticated monitoring and measurement tools, more and more walls are falling as the voice of the customer drowns out old-line corporate precepts.
In today’s environment, customers get far more information from your customer service employees than they do from any press release. Opinions are formed, not from reading “traditional media” or “social media,” but by influencers who are just are probably writing a column in The New York Times, blogging their commentary, posting to Facebook, and tweeting the same information out to their followers.
And that’s another good thing coming down, since on average Digital Natives – the new generation who have never known a world without computers — switch media 27 times every hour.
This new world of “all media, all the time” has forced five major differences in the way we think about measurement:
- It’s not about the media, it’s about the business and the customer.
- It’s not about Big Data, but about how you use it.
- You need to be data informed, not data-driven.
- It’s not how loud you’re shouting, it’s about relationships.
- Standards are a reality, not an excuse to hide behind.
Let’s go over these one by one:
1. Call it PR, Marketing, Social, or Digital: It’s all about the business and the customer.
The silos between PR, marketing, customer service, and internal communications are irrelevant in an era when the customer is in control. If David Pogue influences your customers, how does it help your program to put up artificial barriers between his “traditional media” presence in The New York Times and his “social presence” in his blog, or on his Twitter feed?
This is an era when a tweet can make it around the world ten times before your internal email gets past the first round of approvals. Customers are listening to other customers long before your sales force or your marketing department has a prayer of getting to them. Add to that the fact that your customers today have an infinite ability to filter out messages and will only chose to hear what is relevant and meaningful to them.
For years, trade media has posed the silly question: “What is more important, quantitative or qualitative data? Outcomes or outputs?” The reality is that you can’t have one without the other. Successful PR managers in the future will regularly correlate their media outputs with business outcomes. Their reports will similarly combine data and numbers with insight and context. Which means that the old-fashioned notion of isolating PR metrics from marketing or business results is already becoming a thing of the past. Irrelevant metrics like Advertising Value Equivalents or impressions are increasingly seen as counterproductive and misleading.
Take the following exchange, for example:
I asked a business-to-business client recently why she was tweeting. Her response was, “to get more followers.” When I asked why more followers was the desired result, her response was that ultimately she wanted media coverage because her goal was to make 100 million impressions.
In response, I suggested that having a naked woman run through the streets of her city with her company logo tattooed on her derriere would generate far more impressions in less time and for less money. She quickly backtracked and said that she wanted to reach “the right” 100 million people. So I dug into the nature of her followers on Facebook and Twitter. As it turns out, many of them appeared to be teenage boys who clearly were following her not for her content, but because her profile picture was exceptionally alluring. Very unlikely that they would ever buy the expensive technical product that she was marketing.
We drilled down further, and I asked, “How many new customers does your company need to make its sales goal?” “100,” was her response.
If the desired metric was “Help sales meet its quote by generating 500 qualified leads,” then she’d be writing content that appealed to those 500 qualified prospects, and using a CRM system to measure the number of qualified leads that her efforts were generating. Instead, she was posting on popular sensational topics that were very likely turning off her target audience.
There are several lessons to be learned from this discourse. The first is that you become what you measure and you get what you reward. If you reward people for “getting impressions” you will get more impressions. If you reward business results, you will get better business results. For that reason, in this new world of measurement, it is important that you and your boss and your boss’s boss are all in agreement on what metrics you and your department will be measuring.
I predict a world in the not-too-distant future where the only way marketing and PR will measure their results is in the context of the business plan. Instead of asking, “What tool should I be using?” future generations of PR people will be asking, “What difference did I make to the business?” Key Performance Indicators won’t be based on activities, but rather on data that shows if you increased mindshare, shortened the sales cycle, or increased trust.
Geography has become both irrelevant and indispensable.
In our social era of “you can take it with you” marketing, traditional geographical borders are becoming less relevant. There are more people on Facebook who claim to be from Afghanistan that there are people in Afghanistan, because when most people create new accounts, they just chose the first country they come to. So geo-targeting people by region is highly questionable.
At the same time, where you are at the moment you receive a message or send a post is becoming increasingly important. More and more of the world communicates, searches, and buys from a mobile device. Your measurement metrics need to be able to understand and analyze what data is coming from a phone versus a desktop. At the same time, professional communicators and their researchers need to be more sensitive to cultural and language differences than ever before. But increasingly, those differences are less and less place-based. If you can take your media with you wherever you are, we must think less about the physical borders and more about cultural ones.
This article continues in our March issue: “It’s a Good Thing Coming Down: The State of the World of Measurement, Part 2.”
(image: charansinghdotcom)
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